10/16/2025

The idea of self has been hard for me to pin down. It’s been a commonly-occurring question for me lately--but how do you answer “who am I”? There are so many parts that make up whatever we consider to be the whole, and it seems like each of those parts is in constant motion. How can I possibly hope to track down the real me when that me is always changing--certainly growing linearly, but also subject to cycles of mood and broader seasons of life? 

It’s much easier to imagine the person I’d like to be; the person I’m trying to grow into. Parts of me are already that person, but rarely do the stars align such that those parts exhibit themselves in the same moments. The person I am as I write is a much closer estimate to that ideal because I have the privilege of taking the time to pick out certain aspects or wait for them to naturally manifest. I think that I probably think of myself as that person, but there’s a bunch of caveats and hypotheticals wrapped up in there. And so it makes me wonder... can I claim to be the person that I think I am, that I want to be, if it isn’t always true?

What’s even stranger is trying to do the same for another person. If I do not quite know who I am, and they do not quite know who they are, how are we ever going to find out who the other is? The best we can do is broad approximations. I’ll take a guess, and you will have to decide if I’m right or wrong. And then, hopefully, we both learn about each other and a little about ourselves. I have found this to be tiresome work. Rarely is my best estimate right. Even rarer still is when I know the right answer to the other person’s estimate. At the end of it, you’d like to at least feel confident in the facts you have determined, but that is the rarest thing of all. It’s all a lot of fumbling around and eventually you might get a broad shape. The redeeming thing about it--that makes all this troubling effort worthwhile--is that the broad shape you find is really quite beautiful.